


suddenly i was a lilac sky

by Solanaceae



Series: Colors [2]
Category: Love Live! School Idol Project
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, can be read without reading prior fic in series, they're not connected... for now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 13:55:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12170226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae
Summary: Eli loves too hard. Looks out the window at things that aren’t there. She’s a strange one, Nozomi knows, but she’s alsotheone.Someone, anyways.





	suddenly i was a lilac sky

She still remembered the first time she met Eli.

It was a sunny day, as most days inside were. The digital sky had only been a little pixelated, right at the edges - almost enough to pretend that it was real. A clear day, as they said. Nozomi had been sweeping the dust off the temple steps, preparing for people that would never come, when the world had exploded into blue.

_ I’m Eli Ayase. _

_ I know, _ Nozomi had almost said. Which was ridiculous, because the girl standing in front of her was a complete stranger except for the color suddenly dancing in her eyes. 

_ Did you see that? _

And she could have lied, could have dismissed the girl with a confused look, gone back to her sweeping. But the gods hated lying, so she had nodded, dizzy with the sky’s sudden color.

Eli had smiled like the breaking of the digital sun against the western walls.  _ You’re the one. _

***

“I’m home!”

Nozomi looked up from the book in her hands. Eli stood in the doorway, hair pulled back into a ponytail, a smile on her face. “Ah, welcome back.”

Eli closed the door gently behind her and swept across the room, pausing only to put her papers down on the table. Nozomi just barely had time to stand before Eli’s arms were around her. Eli’s hair smelled like her shampoo, bright and flowery, Nozomi noted distantly as she returned the hug, patting Eli’s back.

“How was your day?”

“Good,” Eli replied, pulling back. “Class was cancelled, so I stayed in and studied at the library.”

Nozomi smiled. “So diligent.”

Eli made a noise in the back of her throat, looking vaguely embarrassed. “I heard the programmers are putting on a fireworks show tomorrow night. I thought maybe we could go up on the roof and watch?”

“Sure,” Nozomi said without thinking. Eli beamed.

“You’re the best, Nozomi.”

***

Over dinner, Eli filled her in on her day (history flash cards, lunch with the daughter of a councillor, progress on her dissertation) while Nozomi nodded. 

“There’s a surveyor test scheduled for next week. Alisa is registered to take it, but I wonder if she actually will.”

The surveyors were the chosen few who ventured outside the walls, seeking resources and conducting tests to see if the planet was becoming habitable again. Whatever they found out there never reached the ears of the general public - every surveyor signed a contract of silence. Eli’s little sister had never struck Nozomi as the kind of person to want to do that kind of thing.

“Why did she sign up?” she asked. 

“Oh, Mother probably wants her to. I don’t know if her test scores are high enough, though.”

Nozomi knew that Eli had scored nearly perfectly on the qualification tests for - well, for almost everything. Even that hadn’t been enough to get her into the ranks of the surveyors. 

“I’m sure she’ll do her best,” Nozomi said. Eli nodded.

“Of course she will.”

***

Life in the domed city wasn’t bad. 

Not that Nozomi had ever known anything different. Like everyone else in her generation, she had been born under the sanctuary provided by the digitally colored ceiling that kept out the radiation and mutated beasts from the wastelands. Tales of the wars that caused all this were confined to whispers; all political talk was carefully monitored by the governor’s security council through the little cameras mounted on every street corner, every classroom, every house.

Nozomi kept to herself. Swept the temple steps, ran odd errands for others. She liked being helpful. Eli was pursuing  _ higher education _ , came home every night with new information about history, politics, the old world. Someday, she wanted to be on the security council, to help keep the city safe.

Nozomi wondered about that, sometimes.

Regardless, Eli’s studies and political aspirations kept her busy. She had homework and classes and  _ friends _ . Nozomi saw her on the weekends, but from Monday to Friday it was all work, all the time. She didn’t mind - not really. It wasn’t as if she had had many friends before Eli, and Eli had the kind of captivating personality that made it easy to fall into her orbit.

And Eli made time for her, talked to her and invited her to her dinners with the children of politicians (even if Nozomi always said no), curled up next to her in bed and professed her love for Nozomi every day.

Well. What else were soulmates for?

***

Eli brought wine and Nozomi brought a blanket and they sat on the flat roof of the apartment complex, side by side. Overhead, the sky was darkening to purple, the sun setting in an exaggerated blaze of fire on the western wall. 

“Surely they don’t  _ have _ to make it go dark every night,” Eli mused. “I’d imagine it takes just as much power to put stars up and lamps on the streets as it would to keep the sky going.”

“It makes it feel more natural.”

“I suppose.”

There was a brief silence. Below, the sounds of footsteps and chatter drifted up as the city settled into the growing darkness. 

The first burst of color lit up the wall, orange pixels bright as flame exploding, then drifting down. There were cheers from below. Soft pops filled the air as the virtual fireworks show picked up speed, showering the sky in color.

Nozomi glanced at Eli. Her face was lit with flashing light - red one moment, blue the next. She was staring up, captivated.

_ I should feel something _ , Nozomi thought. Some flutter in her heart, or a swoop in her stomach. All the things she’d been told love felt like. 

All the things Eli seemed to feel for her, which went unechoed in Nozomi’s heart. 

It was the one flaw in an otherwise perfect life, this absence of feeling. At first, she had thought she would grow into loving Eli, given time. But it had been months - almost a year - and she felt no differently towards the girl than she had when they first met. 

“Are you watching?”

Nozomi shook herself out of thought to find Eli looking at her. Overhead, the muffled imitations of explosions sputtered on. She forced a smile. “Just thinking.”

“About what?” Eli scooted closer to lay her head against Nozomi’s shoulder.

“You.”

***

Sometimes, the weather programmers would get creative and make it cloudy, roiling grey across the sky that obscured the sun and bathed everything in a cold digital light. On those days, looking up made Nozomi feel like she was falling, a swooping feeling of vertigo at the suddenly empty space above her. It brought back the days when grey was the only color she saw when she looked up.

There had been a time when she had wished for that back. Now, she had settled into a rhythm of life with Eli, the two of them side-by-side, even if sometimes, she looked at Eli and saw something in those blue eyes that she knew was not mirrored in hers. Even if sometimes, she looked up at the overcast sky and thought, yes, this was how it should be.

It wasn’t like the sky was real, anyways. Virtual weather, virtual heavens, virtual gods.

Virtual love.

***

“I wish we could go outside,” Eli said one Saturday at the breakfast table.

Nozomi stiffened, shooting a glance up to the corner, where the omnipresent red light of the security camera blinked. “Don’t say that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I would ever  _ go _ outside.” Eli waved a hand dismissively, and Nozomi should’ve known - someone as rule-abiding as Eli would never have a treasonous thought in her head. “Just. I wish it was possible.”

Nozomi made a noncommittal noise.

“Do you think there are people out there?” Eli continued, propping her chin in her hands and staring out the window. “Survivors, I mean.”

“Who could have survived the wars?”

“Well, the surveyors could tell us, if they weren’t censored.”

The red light continued its steady blinking. Nozomi wondered if someone was watching them even now.

“If anyone survived,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “They’ll be all messed up from the fallout. It’s for the best that we’re in here, safe.”

Eli nodded.

***

It wasn’t that she didn’t love Eli. Eli was her closest friend. Someone she could tell all her secrets to, someone to cook with and cuddle and sleep with and  _ sleep with _ . 

It was only that there was something different about Nozomi. 

Some people - cynical people - said that soulmates had been created by demons who wanted to torment humanity. Nozomi had never believed it. She had seen people, happy in the arms of their soulmates - her own parents, for instance. It was rare,  _ lucky  _ even, to find your soulmate, given the size of the surviving population, the immense number of people wiped out by the wars. Soulmates were celebrated in the city as smiled upon by the gods, and the few people who came to the temple were generally there to pray to be similarly blessed.

Oh, of course she had held onto the same hope as everyone in her childhood, that the color she was missing would someday bloom in the eyes of someone else. In elementary school, people would trade secrets by whispering the name of the color they were missing -  _ blue, green, brown. _

Somehow, though, she had never really expected to  _ find _ her. 

People talked about feeling like a puzzle with a piece missing, like there was an empty spot in their chest waiting to be filled. Nozomi had never felt anything but whole on her own.

Finding Eli had changed none of that.

***

“Did you ever wonder who your soulmate was, when you were younger?” Nozomi asked. They were in bed, the lights off and the curtains drawn back, the faint glow of the digital stars shining through. Eli shifted beside her.

“Yes. And everything I imagined - it’s all right here.”

The breath froze in Nozomi’s throat. She swallowed past it, said, “Really?”

Eli turned to face her, outline greyed out by the dark. “Really. Am I everything you wanted, too?” 

_ I care about you. That doesn’t - that doesn’t mean I love you the way you love me. _

Nozomi laughed. “Of course you are, Eli.”

***

Guilt felt like a stone that settled in her stomach, weighed her down. It made it hard to focus on anything. There was something  _ wrong _ with her. Eli couldn’t see it - not yet, anyway - but Nozomi felt like she was unraveling every time Eli said something that made the gap between them even more tangible.

She felt lost.

***

One morning, walking back from the temple, an idea struck her. She quickened her pace. When she reached their third floor apartment, she let herself in and hurried into the bedroom.

Under their bed was a box, one with all her papers and mementos from high school. Nozomi knelt on the carpet and opened the box, shuffling through the yellowing pages. At the bottom was a worn out deck of cards kept together by a rubber band.

It had been years since she had touched her tarot cards. They had been an amusing enough hobby when she was younger, something to entertain the other students with, but that had fallen away once she left school and spent more and more time alone.

_ Might as well see what they have to say. _

Nozomi took a breath, centering herself, then unwound the rubber band and started shuffling the deck. Her fingers found their rhythm quickly, settling into a familiar pattern. With her left hand, she cut the deck in half, then lay the two piles side by side.

She closed her eyes and drew a card from the first, placed it on the carpet in front of her. When she looked, a breath of laughter escaped her. Two figures entangled under the branching wings of an angel, overshadowed by trees. 

The Lovers. Of course.

“Are you making fun of me?” she asked the cards, amused despite herself. She had forgotten how tarot made her feel, the peaceful serenity of letting herself surrender to the hands of fate.

Taking another deep breath, she drew from the second pile. The Magician - a card of action, of gaining the power to make your wishes manifest. 

_ But what wishes? _

She drew the last two at the same time. The six of swords and the eight of cups. 

Sitting back on her heels, she bit her lip. This  _ meant _ something, even if she couldn’t quite put her finger on what. Both cards were associated with leaving, searching for something better. The eight of cups in particular carried a connotation of  _ abandonment. _

She went to the messaging console in the corner of the room and scrolled through her contacts. 

One of the secondary meanings of the Lovers card was  _ choice _ . 

Nozomi hesitated, then typed out a message, hit send.

_ Can you meet me? _

***

Outside the cafe, a gardener watered the flowers, a long green hose snaking past the window. 

“When we were growing up, Eli would always ask about going outside.” Alisa swirled her spoon in her tea, the metal clinking against the sides of the cup. “Of course, she would never actually go out without permission, and when she failed the test to be a surveyor, she was devastated.” 

Nozomi blinked. She had known that Eli had taken the surveyor test, but when she spoke of it (which was rarely), she had always brushed it off as a whim, something she had done for fun and nothing more. It wasn’t as if many people got to be surveyors, anyways - one out of every hundred applicants, or so they said.

“So why did she want to go?”

Alisa shrugged. “I think because Mother was a surveyor, she wanted to continue the tradition. And she was always looking at pictures from before. Maybe she just wanted to see what it looked like.”

A seed of an idea danced at the back of Nozomi’s mind. (She just wanted to do something for Eli. Something nice.)  She took a sip of her tea, then met Alisa’s eyes. 

“Can you do me a favor?”

***

Nozomi might not have had many friends, but she did know how to use her eyes and ears. In some ways, she felt more kinship with the security cameras and their little red lights than she did with other people. They, too, kept their sense alert, collecting information about everyone, transmitting it to a database.

Eli loved her, but she was also oblivious. She was busy with so many things, blinded by love, trusting in Nozomi to be the soulmate she was supposed to be. It was suffocating, she realized. Living under a digital sky with someone who seemed so entirely devoted to making her happy when she had never needed that from anyone.

But she owed Eli so  _ much _ for this life that Eli had tried so hard to build for them. There had been times Nozomi could forget, when being with Eli felt like being with her closest friend and nothing more complicated, just the two of them and happiness burning golden in her chest.

She couldn’t feel the same way as Eli. 

Perhaps she could make up for that, though.

***

Nozomi woke early, but the other side of the bed was already empty. She got dressed quickly and padded down the hallway towards the living room.

Eli stood in the window, framed by the cold digital sky. Her hands were wrapped around a steaming mug, and there was a strangely yearning look on her face. She didn’t seem to notice Nozomi standing in the doorway, and Nozomi half wanted to hold her breath, let this moment stretch on forever.

But no. She had something to do.

“Eli?” 

“Hm?” Eli turned, a smile erasing whatever ache had been there before. “You’re up early.”

“I - I wanted to take a walk.”

Eli blinked, seemingly caught off guard. “You did?”

Nozomi nodded. “I wanted to... to meditate a little. In silence.”

“Okay.” Eli set her mug down and crossed the room to kiss Nozomi. Her lips were warm, and Nozomi could taste the faint spice of her tea as she pulled away. “Have fun.”

“I will.” 

***

Alisa’s surveyor suit fit a little snugly, especially across the chest, but Nozomi managed to wriggle into it. She breathed a sigh of relief when the test administrators barely glanced at her ID before waving her through. 

The surveyor test, according to Alisa, consisted of a written portion and a practical exam that sent prospective surveyors outside the dome for fifteen or so minutes. Alisa had already sat for the written exam, and she had been more than willing to let Nozomi take her place for the rest of it.

In her bag were her tarot cards, a camera she had found at an antique shop that printed pictures immediately, and as many anti-radiation pills as she could get her hands on, besides a few protein packs and water.

She followed the others towards the north edge of the city, where a low set of doors were embedded in the wall.The guards waved them through, and they entered the tunnel. Nozomi knew conceptually that the walls were meters thick, but it felt entirely different to walk through them and  _ see _ that protective thickness.

The doors at the end swung open with a creak and Nozomi found herself blinking in a strangely warm light.

The ground outside was littered with rocks and rusting bits of twisted metal, a few tufts of yellow grass poking up between pebbles here and there. A flattened path wound its way up the side of a hill - a  _ hill _ , when everything inside was perfectly level. Nozomi could hear the whispers of the other students through the thick radiation-proof suits.

“This way,” the instructor called, and Nozomi held back, making sure she was at the back of the line. When they started walking, she waited a few seconds, then ducked behind a large boulder, pressing her back to it. Her breath echoed loudly in the enclosed suit as she stayed as still as possible, waiting for the sounds of footsteps to fade.

She had ten, maybe fifteen minutes before they realized she was gone.

Hurriedly, she adjusted her bag over her shoulders and started jogging as fast as she could in the cumbersome suit, trying to keep out of sight by weaving between boulders. Before long, she was out of breath, panting and sweating under the thick white cloth.

_ Just a bit farther. _ There was a rise in elevation in front of her, and what looked like a sudden drop off after that. If she could get over that, it should provide enough cover.

As she crested the hill, her breath caught in her throat.

Spread out beneath her was a town. 

The houses were ramshackle things, clearly cobbled together out of whatever was on hand, but they were unmistakably human-made. A thin path zigzagged down the face of the steep drop, leading down to the town. From up here, Nozomi could see movement, figures milling around in the streets.

There were  _ people _ down there.

Nozomi hitched up her bag, which had started slipping down her shoulder. This was it. She could turn back, rejoin the group, go back to the city with its recycled air and pixelated sky and Eli. 

She took a deep breath and started down the path. 

**Author's Note:**

> yikes lmao this was gonna be twice as long but then the Plot(tm) got away from me and i decided to split it up (tho the second installment of Nozomi’s part of the story may not be the next thing written in this series). anyways pls comment n lmk what you think!
> 
> tarot card meanings from daily-tarot-girl.com.


End file.
